Joseph Bottum

Occupying Anarchism

In the fall of 2011, I spent a few days with a group of young people—well, mostly young people—having been commissioned by a magazine to write an article about the Occupy Wall Street protest movement in New York. In the end, I didn't get the article written, primarily because I couldn't find a way to explain the enormous spiritual anxiety I felt radiating from nearly all of the people I met.

Nonetheless, in the purity of their spiritual angst, the protestors seemed to me a revelation. Conservative journals and websites at the time made much of the underreported crime, the rapes and robberies, at Occupy sites, even while liberal publications pronounced the movement utterly peaceful. But my own experience was that the protestors were, on the whole, astonishingly good people, if the word good is used in a somewhat special sense. There around Zuccotti Park, down near Wall Street, a few hundred of them had gathered for deeply felt moral purposes they could not name with any precision—for moral goals they often refused, as a moral principle, to specify.

Claiming to speak for the "99 percent," the impoverished majority of the world, the Occupy protestors clearly desired wealth redistribution of some kind, and yet they repeatedly rejected any attempt to issue a set of policy demands to achieve that end. "We want change," a sweet young man and his girlfriend tried to explain to me after I'd brought them coffee and Danish early one morning. "Just change." But when I asked him what change in particular, he picked at the raveled cuffs of his hoodie for a while before rambling through a tirade that amounted to little more than a wish that his own moral outrage would shame America's wealthy malefactors into a reformation of the heart.

Most of all, he said, "we want people to know about the wrongness in society the way we do. We want them to see us as the 'moral vanguard of change' " (repeating a catchphrase from a meeting the night before). "Exactly," the young woman with him added. "We want people to see how brave we are, and to know that they can be brave, too." We want people to see how brave we are—in that ingenuous phrase, and in its speaker's guileless face, was written all the burden of our anxious age: an anxiety not just to be morally right but to be confirmed as morally right. Not just to be saved but to be certain of salvation.

An era more comfortable than ours with religious history would have understood immediately what Occupy Wall Street was: a protest against the continuing reign of Satan and a plea for the coming of the Kingdom of God, with a new heaven and a new earth. In perhaps their most revealing invention, the protestors developed strange hand-waving gestures as rules of order and a substitute for voting during meetings—a marvelously utopian attempt to achieve absolute equality and democracy within their own community of saints. This was not a coherent religious worldview making an ethical stand against a particular evil, as the early 1960s civil rights movement had been in the view of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, led by the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. This was instead a great, incoherent cry of apocalyptic spiritual pain: We know what is right—true, good, real—and still the world lies in sin and error.

The people at Occupy Wall Street were the return of the Levellers and Diggers, lifted straight out of the 17th century—albeit with the explicit religion of those old Christian movements shed along the way. (Except for a pair of elderly peace activists trying to start a prayer circle, everyone I interviewed described Christianity in general, and Catholicism in particular, as a major source of the evil they had set out to oppose.) "Demands cannot reflect inevitable success," as an Occupy manifesto declared in a wonderful blast of chiliastic rhetoric. "Demands imply condition, and we will never stop. Demands cannot reflect the time scale that we are working with."

But if the Occupy protesters (and the media reporting on them) lack the religious-history vocabulary with which to look back and understand their movement, that doesn't mean they think of themselves as divorced from the past. They consistently claim, in fact, a relation to the tradition of political thought known as Anarchism.

Not the bombings and assassinations of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, of course; they typically run from association with that violence as fast as they can. But they often, and sometimes convincingly, report that the movement was watered by the stream of philosophical Anarchism that flows from Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Max Stirner to Mikhail Bakunin and Emma Goldman. Far less convincing is their attempt to claim everyone from Lao Tzu and Diogenes the Cynic to François Rabelais and William Penn as true anarchists, but what movement doesn't cast a wide net when fishing for grand names from the past with which to associate themselves?

Anxious to hear more about your ministry. Do you psator or minister at other places. I am so hungry to be in this kind of atmosphere!Please pray for my 19 year old special needs granddaughter. Her mother don't want her and her step-mother does not know how to handle her and my son is at his wits end in dealing with the whole thing.thanks!

Bill

September 25, 20139:19pm

This is an interesting and well-written article, but I want to comment on this sentence:
"Every attempt at actual Anarchism has eventually become either a puppet of the communists, a leftist statism, or actual anarchy&mdash;which is to say a mob without staying power or resilience."
While I'm not sure what the author means by "actual Anarchism," the experience of the anarchists in Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War would seem to contradict his conclusion. More importantly, it is wrong to say that "actual anarchy" is a mob. Actual anarchy is an absence of coercion and an absence of artificial hierarchies.

Dirk Buchholz

September 08, 20134:51pm

Actually anarchism is not a failure or just well meaning theory One need only look to the Iroquois Confederacy to see the possibilities , in real and actual terms.

Avery

September 06, 201311:51pm

The media became quickly uninterested in how ignoble Occupy's political pursuit of spiritual freedom became. For example, this past May, Occupy Boston held a rally in support of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. This was posted to several Occupy mailing lists but I have not seen any media report on it. Perhaps, in the haste to manufacture narratives of hopeful protest or leftism, the real story, which is quite similar to this article, got lost.

Lewis Lorton

September 04, 20135:01pm

While I have no basis for any opinion on the relationships between Occupy and more formal political thought, several things were clear to me from the Occupy encampments I photographed and the people I talked to.
First, no matter how much this was denied, there were leaders who pushed the mass in a certain direction.
Second, most people had no clue about how to proceed towards the future they envisioned so foggily. There was this innocent belief that the inchoate 99% somehow had the knowledge embedded that would form this new society and, merely by stating their non-goals, it would somehow become so.
From the very first meeting I attended in October, 2011 in DC. it was clear that Occupy was a confused, embarrassingly self-righteous mess.

Free

September 01, 20134:17pm

It is fascinating to look at that mix of freedom and control that permeates all that is in people interactions that become governments or tribal relationships. for those on the left, the salient feature of any leftist philosophy is to reject any of the forms extent, including religion to clear the path for a new perfect, or at least better way forward.
The author notes that Marxisms as governments resulted in very strongly repressive systems. The withering that Marx foresaw in at least some of his writings has never been witnessed.
Do we not all want a system that is less intrusive and oppressive (very close correlatives)? The present movement throughout both parties' occupation of power is the growth of the state to intrude ever greater amounts in our lives.
The balance between anarchy where the bandit group seizes terror as tool of power and the state heavy with power and intrusiveness is difficult for man. It is not in man to direct his own steps....

fair

September 01, 20131:51pm

Ray,
I do not care if some people (he had over 50 million downloads) think Molyneux (or any of the authors in the article who I know nothing about) is a bloodsucking reptile, the reincarnation of Buddha nor how he published his books.
I particularly recommend his book "Practical Anarchy" to those who are curious to learn how a free society could work in practice. They are free, easy to read and logically consistent. They describe a fascinating model of a free (decentralized) society which has many values in common with most religions or atheists.
Alternatively his podcasts or youtube videos are super easy to understand/entertaining and the best introduction to Anarchism I have come across.
For those interested to checkout the other (left and not quite as free) side (anarcho syndicalism) google "participatory economics".
Both "left" and "right" are worth listening too as is the religious approach or that of the "Venus Project".

Ray

August 30, 20134:29pm

It would be generous to say that Mr. Molyneux is not a supporter of any church. That's because he's downright hostile to any theistic belief, especially Christianity. He is a cult leader, a failed academic who self-publishes (probably the only way he can get his work out in print), he encourages children to disown their families (a process known as "defoo-ing, or removing yourself from your "family of origin") and is a supporter of something known as "unschooling", where I guess kids do whatever they want. Christians should avoid this guy.

DrBrydon

August 30, 201310:41am

There are two choices: be self-governing or be governed. The Occupy movement refuses to believe that we are self-governing, because they can't accept that that the outcomes of politics are the ones most people want. Occupy believes that what they wanted is right, and everyone else is wrong (or has been systematically fooled). As Brecht observed about a similar group, they'd like to dissolve the people and elect a new one. Occupy failed first of all because its base premises are wrong. I say this as an unemployed member of the 99%. Because Occupy and Anarchism can't accept that we are self-governing, and they can't elaborate how they would practice self-government, the best they can hope for is failure, the worst fascism. Occupy is gone now because got the one thing it really needed: a nap.

interested in all alternatives

August 30, 20131:36am

Joseph,
You have touched on an important subject anarchism. However, I fear most readers will still have no idea what anarchism is about. In particular you have left out - perhaps the most popular branch: Anarcho-Capitalism.
I is based on two principles:
1. The non- aggression principle (nobody has the moral right to use force on anyone other than in self defense)
2. The right to own property including your own body (unlike in today's world where we are born as property of a state, needing a passport and permissions by our owner to move around etc..)
For a detailed description how roads, companies, a justice system, a defense system etc would work in a free society could work browse through some of Stefan Molyneux books (all free to download or even order): http://www.freedomainradio.com/FreeBooks.aspx#pa
Yes, the author is not a big supporter of any church but if you want to inform people about anarchism it does not make sense to skip the currently most popular "branch".